Former Republican presidential candidate Joe Walsh is asking X owner Elon Musk to apologize for spreading misinformation on his social media network. Musk wrote: “Many states automatically register anyone with a driver’s license to vote (no citizenship verification), ballots are then mailed out and ‘ballot harvesters’ pick them up mail them in, making fraud traceability impossible.”
[Note: Currently 24 states and the District of Columbia offer automatic voter registration to people who are eligible to vote when they apply for a driver’s license.]
Walsh asked Musk: “will you apologize for lying here? You have millions of followers. Please do the right thing and correct this.” (In one regard, Walsh downplayed the situation: Musk has not mere “millions” but 170+ million followers on X.)
Hey @elonmusk, will you apologize for lying here? You have millions of followers. Please do the right thing and correct this. https://t.co/J17t8P9tDF
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) February 6, 2024
Misinformation and disinformation are hardly new — as anyone familiar with Donald Trump‘s “Stop the Steal” campaign can attest — but the proliferation of fact-adjacent “information” remains a growing concern, not least on Musk’s X platform, as the 2024 election looms and with it the simultaneous race, already begun, to cast doubt on any future outcomes.
[NOTE: Election integrity, even where it exists, is only as effective as the trust in it — notably, two-thirds of Republican voters still believe, despite scores of court findings to the contrary, that the last Presidential election was corrupt.]
Walsh’s request follows news of James O’Keefe, and his right-wing group Project Veritas, settling a lawsuit brought on by Erie, Pennsylvania postmaster Robert Weisenbach. NBC News reported that Project Veritas “had boosted the claims of Richard Hopkins, a Trump supporter who worked as a mail carrier at the time and claimed that he’d heard Weisenbach make statements about illegally backdating mail-in ballots.”
Hopkins retracted his statement, admitted being wrong and apologized publicly.
In November 2020, I reported that election fraud had occurred in Erie, Pennsylvania during the 2020 Presidential Election. This story was based on Richard Hopkins’ claim that he had overheard Robert Weisenbach, the Erie Postmaster, direct another USPS supervisor to illegally… pic.twitter.com/Hq6zL73SH4
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) February 5, 2024
O’Keefe was also forced to admit publicly that Hopkins’s story was false. O’Keefe wrote yesterday on X: “Mr. Hopkins has since come to learn that he was wrong — neither Mr. Weisenbach nor any other USPS employee in Erie, Pennsylvania engaged in election fraud or any other wrongdoing related to mail-in ballots,” he wrote, but not before the doubt his charge triggered had done its work.
